Murder Grins and Bears It (18 page)

Carl chimed in. “There were two of them and
they couldn’t see Little Donny because he was stashed inside the
brush in case a bear showed up.” I had already guessed as much
because I’d seen the flattened grass. “You were supposed to be
awake and watching for bear action,” Carl admonished him.

“
Did they say anything?” I
asked.

Little Donny nodded. “One said his integrity
wasn’t for sale and he wasn’t going through with it. The other one
didn’t say anything, but the first one kept talking like he was
trying to explain himself. Like he didn’t want to have to do it but
he had no choice. I couldn’t see much because I was flat on the
ground and the brush was thick. But I could see them from about the
knees down. One had on brown pants like a uniform and the other
wore green coveralls, the kind you buy at the farm and equipment
store and he had on workboots.”

“
Then what happened?” I
took my notebook out of my big purse and started
writing.

“
They began pushing each
other, and I couldn’t believe it but the one with green coveralls
ran over and grabbed my rifle that was leaning against the tree.
The other guy started backing up, saying this could be worked
out.”

Little Donny’s hand shook when he picked up
his coffee cup and took a drink. “The overalled one said, ‘Too
late,’ and he fired the rifle point-blank at the other guy, who
fell over, and I knew right then he was dead. I almost died myself
from shock.”

I reached over and put a hand on his
shoulder. “You’ve been through a lot for a nineteen-year-old.”

Little Donny shoved another doughnut in his
mouth to keep from bawling, and Carl helped out with the story.
“Little Donny yelped when the rifle went off and the guy heard him.
Isn’t that right?”

Little Donny’s eyes looked older than mine.
“I took off running when he swung around. He pulled off another
shot and I ran as hard as I could. He had an ATV that I didn’t know
about until I heard it start up, and then he was trying to chase me
through the trees on the machine.”

“
Only Little Donny was
smart,” Carl added. “He kept moving through the denser woods where
the ATV couldn’t run. You raise ‘em right, Gertie.”

“
Thanks, Carl,” I said,
chilled at how close I’d come to losing my grandson.

“
While I ran, I dropped my
clothes because orange is so easy to spot,” Little Donny continued.
“I’d stripped down to nothing but my pants, and then I found the
thickest brush and hunkered down. He drove by without seeing me,
but for a split second I thought I was a goner. After, I made my
way here and jimmied the back door lock.”

“
Then he called me,” Carl
said. “Lucky for him, the phone wasn’t disconnected.”

I hadn’t turned off any of Grandma Johnson’s
utilities because I hoped she’d move back home soon. My mental
health depended on believing that.

“
Your prints are on the
arrows in Billy Lundberg’s back,” I said.

“
I looked over Carl’s
arrows, thinking I might try bow hunting next time.”

“
Did you get a good look at
the killer?”

“
Not a real good look, but
I think I’d know him if I saw him again.”

“
I asked the same thing,”
Carl said. “Little Donny said he didn’t have any distinguishing
features.”

“
A big guy,” Little Donny
said.

“
All us Swedes and Finns
are large,” Carl replied. “It could have been anybody.”

“
Did he see you real good?”
I needed to know.

Little Donny shrugged. “Probably about the
same as I saw him.”

“
What happened to your
cap?”

“
Like I said, I flung
everything off.”

“
And Billy found it and put
it on.”

To me, a flock of illegal birds hardly
seemed like a motive for multiple murders.

“
When Carl told me that a
warrant had been issued for my arrest, we decided I better hide
until this blows over.”

Well, this situation wasn’t a light breeze.
It was more like a tornado, and I wasn’t sure it would blow over
without some interference on my part.

“
You can’t tell anyone that
I’m here,” Little Donny said.

“
Your parents are
suffering.” I said.

“
You know how mom is? Tell
her and she’ll never keep it a secret.”

Heather was a blabbermouth. Always had been.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“
You can’t hide forever,”
Carl said.

“
What’s that on your arms?”
I noticed the familiar welts.

“
I must have got into some
stinging nettle when I was hiding,” Little Donny said. “Man, does
it itch.”

“
He’s a hunted man,” Carl
said.

Carl could say that again. If the killer
thought Little Donny got a good look at him, my grandson had more
than the law to worry about.

chapter 14

Black bears are an integral part of life in
the U.P. But if anyone tells you we have grizzlies, don’t believe
them because it isn’t true. If anyone tries to tell you how
dangerous our bears are, don’t listen to them. Unless, of course,
you encounter a mama with her cubs.

Then you better run like…well…like you have
a killer bear on your butt.

Fat chance of getting away, though, because
our bears, in spite of their slow, clumsy gait, can outrun any
human alive. And once they catch you, you’re shredded cabbage.

That’s what happened to BB Smith when he
decided to wandered away from his stinky bait pile to relieve
himself against a Michigan conifer.

“
Never, ever, leave your
weapon behind,” Walter said to him. “Why do you Detroit boys always
have to learn everything the hard way?”

We were sitting around Walter Laasko’s
cluttered table, having ended the usual standoff in his yard.

“
I survived, didn’t I?”
BB’s bandaged arm hung in a sling and he bore several stitches for
nasty gashes on his cheeks.

“
And who do you have to
thank for that?” Remy asked. “Me, that’s who.” Remy turned in my
direction. “I heard him screaming and thrashing around in the
bushes and so I came running. I didn’t want to shoot at the bear
because what if I hit BB instead? I didn’t want to get too close in
case she went for me, so I shot in the air a few times and she ran
away.”

Walter groaned. “Another thing I tell you
over and over, practice shooting for hunting season before you get
up here. What good does a rifle do if you can’t hit what you shoot
at?” He reached over to the counter and held up a coffee pot.
“Gertie, how about some coffee? It’s still hot.”

I nodded and Walter poured some in a cup. It
oozed out of the pot thick, like city sewer sludge, and it smelled
old. He handed it to me.

“
This calls for a little
snort,” he said, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of brandy. I
wondered how many of Walter’s special occasions called for a shot
or two. It seemed like every visit deserved an alcoholic
toast.

I held a hand over my cup while Walter
poured booze for the three brothers. Soon Marlin, Remy, and BB
Smith would be running around in the backwoods, fired up on brandy,
sporting weapons they couldn’t shoot straight even when stone cold
sober.

That’s life in the northern woods during
hunting season.

“
The bear cub was so cute,”
BB said, slurping brandy tinged with a splash of coffee. “Looked
almost like a big furry puppy. I thought it was lost in the woods.
Friendly little thing.”

“
Another hunting rule
flushed down the toilet,” Walter crabbed. “Never approach a bear
cub, ’cause the mother bear is always someplace nearby.”

“
I’ve
never seen such a
black
bear,” Marlin said.

“
That’s why they call them
black bears,” Walter said, not bothering to hide the disgust in his
voice.

“
I saw one out west, it was
brown,” Remy said.

“
Well, ours are black.”
Walter tasted his coffee and added more brandy.

“
How’s the stinging nettle,
Walter?” I asked, wondering how to ditch my cup of mud.

Walter rubbed his arm. “A little better. I
spit on it as soon as I realized what happened and applied baking
soda when I got home. That did the trick.”

“
It’s odd that an old pro
like you would get caught up in nettle.”

“
Happens to the best of
us.” We looked at each other. Walter grinned and I saw gaps in the
front of his mouth where teeth used to be.

“
Maybe you can show me
where it is so I can look out for it,” I fibbed. “I don’t know what
stinging nettle looks like.”

“
I’ll show you as soon as
we wrap up here.”

Ordinarily at a pause in the conversation
like this, we would have one of our traditional Yooper silences
where we regroup and move on to another topic. But the Detroit boys
weren’t used to our ways, and the quiet bothered them. I could see
them squirming, trying to think of something to keep the
conversation going.

“
Let’s tell her about the
warden,” BB said, gleefully breaking the silence.

“
Let’s not,” Marlin said,
flatly, his coffee cup frozen in midair.

“
Too late, blabbermouth,”
Remy said.

“
She’s not going to turn
you in,” Walter said. “She’s one of us.”

I looked over at Walter, sitting at his
dirty table with brandy on his morning breath and no teeth in his
head, and wondered when I became one of him. It must have snuck up
on me so slowly while living all these years in the backwoods that
I didn’t notice until it was way too late.

But a private investigator is like an
American Indian shapeshifter - mysterious, elusive, and able to
blend in whenever she needs to. I decided to take Walter’s comment
as a compliment despite its potential to insult.

“
Tell me what happened,” I
said to BB, remembering his words that first day I met him,
something about a warden wanting to arrest him.

“
They were shining way back
by that last bait pile,” Walter said. “And they got
caught.”

“
Shining” involves hunting
at night with spotlights, and it’s illegal. Out-of-towners like to
drive down our back roads after dark, piles of them stuffed into
trucks, looking for good spots to shine their lights and take wild
shots at startled animals. Unfortunately, our local warden, Rolly,
rarely catches them.

I scowled for effect.

“
I know,” BB said, reading
my face. “We shouldn’t have been doing it and we didn’t catch
anything anyway so it doesn’t matter. But we were sitting there by
the bait pile minding our own business when we heard an ATV coming.
We thought it was Walter so we didn’t hide.”

“
Pretty soon the ATV
stopped at the edge of our light,” Remy said. “And we saw that it
was a DNR agent and we were caught right there with the spotlight
on our bait pile and rifles and no good excuse.”

“
We thought we were going
to jail for sure,” Marlin agreed.

“
When was this?” I
said.

“
Real early in the morning
when it was still dark, the same day that warden was
killed.”

I perked right up, and it wasn’t because of
the caffeine. The Detroit boys must have been the last to see
Warden Hendricks alive, other than Little Donny and the killer in
overalls.

“
What did he look like?” I
said.

BB shrugged. “He stayed in the shadows but
he had on the clothes. You can’t mistake that brown uniform for
anything else.”

“
And he had a sidearm,”
Marlin added.

“
And he talked real slow
like John Wayne,” BB added. “He said he was in a hurry to get
somewhere but we should wait around and he’d be back to arrest
us.”

“‘
Sit tight,’ that’s what
he told us.” Remy leaned over and said, confidential-like, “Yeah,
right, like we’d wait there because he told us to. How dumb does he
think we are?”

“
Yeah,” Marlin said, and
added, “We came back to our trailer and hid the spotlight and went
out again at dawn. But we stayed clear of that bait pile and we had
our story worked out. It would be our word against his. Three
against one. Later that morning we heard he’d been
killed.”

I shot a glance at Walter.

He could easily have followed the warden on
his own ATV. And he had a motive. The warden had threatened three
of his paying customers with jail time, and judging by the
meagerness of his furnishings, Walter couldn’t afford to lose the
additional income.

“
What do you think about
all this?” I asked him, my eyes skimming over the stinging nettle
welts on his arms.

“
Bunch a’ fools,” Walter
said, kicking back from the table and mistakenly thinking my
question was aimed at his guests rather than at the general
situation. “Let’s go. I’ll show you the stinging nettle
now.”

“
We’re headed back out to
hunt,” BB said, and they all rose, draining the last dregs of
coffee and brandy and gathering their equipment.

“
Guess it’s just you and me
then.” Walter gave me a toothless grin and picked up his sawed-off
shotgun.

“
Oh, look at the time,” I
said, feigning a glance at my watch. “I have to run. I’ll take a
rain check on that offer.”